South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster signed H.B. 4591 on May 19, turning the Stop Harm from Addictive Social Media Act into a law that will reshape how every resident of the state uses major social media platforms.
The bill passed with almost no opposition, clearing the House 115-0 and the Senate 42-1. It takes effect January 1, 2027, and it brings with it a surveillance apparatus aimed at all users.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
The law, sponsored by Rep. Brandon Guffey (R-York), requires covered platforms to repeatedly estimate and verify the age of every South Carolina account holder.
The stated goal is child protection. The way it claims to do that is continuous behavioral analysis of anyone who spends enough time on a platform, combined with escalating confidence thresholds and penalties of ten thousand dollars per violation if platforms get it wrong.
Here’s how the age estimation system works. Once an account holder hits 25 cumulative hours on a platform within six months (the “first trigger date”), the platform has 14 days to estimate whether that person is over 15, with 80% confidence.
At 50 hours (the “second trigger date”), the confidence requirement jumps to 90%. After that, the platform must update its estimate every 100 hours of use, or whenever it runs data analytics on the user for any other reason, whichever comes sooner.
That last clause is easy to miss and it means any time a platform runs its profiling algorithms on you for ad targeting, content recommendations, or anything else, it also has to re-evaluate your estimated age. The law essentially piggybacks mandatory age surveillance onto whatever commercial surveillance platforms already conduct, expanding the scope of both.
Because platforms face significant liability if they can’t meet these confidence thresholds, the law creates powerful incentives to harvest far more sensitive data about users than they do today, including about minors.
A platform that guesses wrong faces $10,000 per violation. A platform that overinvests in behavioral profiling to avoid those fines faces no penalty at all. The incentive structure points in one direction.
The bill claims it “does not create any duty on the part of a covered social media platform to request, collect, or retain any information from or about any account holder” and that age estimates must be “derived based on information collected and retained by the covered social media platform in the ordinary course of operation.”
This is the bill’s central fiction. Platforms that can’t achieve 80% or 90% confidence from existing data will need to collect more data, or face financial ruin from accumulated violations. The law doesn’t mandate new data collection in the same way that holding a knife to your wallet doesn’t mandate you hand over cash.
For users classified as children (under 16), the restrictions are extensive. Accounts require verifiable parental consent, with privacy settings locked to the most restrictive levels by default.
Platforms cannot show children profile-based feeds, profile-based advertising, or any “addictive interface features,” a category that includes infinite scrolling, auto-play video, push notifications, and display of personal metrics like reaction counts.
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